Monday, August 19, 2013

Delaware, and what we think we know, that we do not

Delaware, our first state, is surprisingly diverse. Its Piedmont north is primarily industrial
and urban, but there are some lovely (and surprisingly rich) rocky streams
tumbling across the low fall line.
Large, prosperous farms dominate the sandy coastal plain of the south,
where I was personally startled to find blackwater swamps, dominated by bald
cypress. And with the Delaware Museum of
Natural History in Wilmington, the Academy of Natural Sciences 20 miles north
in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Natural History 70 miles east in
Washington, the state of Delaware is cradled in the greatest concentration of
malacological talent in the USA, if not the world.

Should we be surprised to learn that Delaware has never seen
a survey of its freshwater gastropod fauna?
Or that the systematic collections of the DMNH, the ANSP and the USNM hold but 151 lots of freshwater gastropods collected in The First
State combined, under 31 nomina, 11 of which are misidentifications or junior
synonyms? It seems likely to me that
this situation arises from some sort of “neglected backyard effect,” our North
American imaginations so transfixed by the Brazilian Amazon and the Black
Smokers of the Abyss that we tend to overlook the little creeks running through
our own city parks back home.

I am now pleased to report that a remedy is at hand. In coming months the FWGNA project will roll
out a new website entitled, “The Freshwater Gastropods of the Mid-Atlantic
States” which will include surveys of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern
Pennsylvania, and the West Virginia panhandle.
Our extensive original collections, sampled from approximately 144 sites
spread down the 100 mile length and across the 30 mile breadth of The First
State, will confirm that a fairly reliable estimate for the number of gastropod
species inhabiting the freshwaters of Delaware is indeed 20, as might have been
predicted from the meager museum records available.

We will be sharing much more detail about the freshwater
gastropods of all the Mid-Atlantic states in the coming months. My focus for the remainder of this essay is
not on what we now know, but on what we thought we knew, that we did not.

I am not a fan of the nonprofit environmental group called,
“NatureServe,” or its online database “Explorer.” But if you were to open a new window in your
web browser today (19Aug13), go to www.natureserve.org,
hit that “Explorer” button on the right panel, and execute a query for
freshwater snails AND Delaware, the search engine will return a list of just
eight species.

This is a peculiar list.
Missing from it are the four most common gastropod species actually
inhabiting the freshwaters of Delaware: Physa acuta (aka P. heterostropha),
Menetus dilatatus, Ferrissia fragilis, and Lymnaea (Pseudosuccinea)columella. All four of these species are
very nearly cosmopolitan in their distribution throughout eastern North America,
and simple reference to the collections of either the DMNH or the ANSP would
have returned numerous Delaware records for most of them.

The NatureServe report will also include one species that our extensive field surveys of Delaware and attendant reviews of
systematic collections have failed to uncover, Physa gyrina. Populations of Physa gyrina do inhabit Ridley
Creek in Delaware County, southeastern Pennsylvania, so on first reading it certainly seems possible that the NatureServe record might be bona fide. Or might this record represent a
misidentification of Physa acuta? The
DMNH collection does hold a single undated lot of P. acuta (locality just
“Wilmington”) misidentified as P. gyrina.

On 28July13 I sent an email inquiry to Dr. Bruce Young,
Director of “Species Science” for NatureServe, asking if he could provide a
reference supporting his report of P. gyrina in Delaware. Dr. Young replied the next day, apologizing
that “for common species we do not tie specific records to individual
references or museum collections.” Ms.
Margaret Ormes of NatureServe followed up with “I just looked at our database
and my best guess is that it was added (as Physella gyrina) based on Burch
(1989).” [1]

I do appreciate the courtesy of the NatureServe staff, but
the facts are very plain and very ugly.
The mission of NatureServe is advocacy, not science, and Physa gyrina is
a trash snail, and they do not care whether arbitrarily-chosen trash snails
actually inhabit arbitrarily-chosen states.
The NatureServe Explorer database is a smokescreen and a ruse, designed
to lend false scientific credibility to a political agenda.

Science is the construction of testable models about the
natural world. Such models need not
necessarily be accurate, nor even based on reliable data. I am not fussing here about the discrepancy
between the NatureServe estimate of 8 freshwater gastropod species in Delaware,
and the FWGNA estimate of 20. Nor am I
fussing about the basis of the NatureServe estimate, which is spurious.

Science will fix these things, eventually. There are scientists who will drive 16,139
miles in a 1992 Nissan pickup, camp in the rain, and eat Dinty Moore beef stew
for a week to not find Physa gyrina in Delaware. There are scientists who will dump three
years of unsorted DNREC-DWR macrobenthic samples into little Petrie dishes and
squint through microscopes for hours to not find Physa gyrina in Delaware. There are scientists who will sleep five
nights on an air mattress in Alexandria to ride the orange line downtown to
pull every drawer of physids out of the US National Museum to not find Physa
gyrina in Delaware. Science ultimately
fixes carelessness, sloppiness, and neglect.

No, the worst thing about the Explorer database is not that
it is wrong, but that it reinforces
conventional ignorance, and in so doing works against the cause we all seek
to advance. Fresh young students,
casting about for research ideas, will tend to assume that the freshwater
gastropod fauna of North America is in some sense “known,” and divert their
energies elsewhere. A proposal to the
NSF Biotic Surveys and Inventories Program will be reviewed more favorably if
it is directed toward the Ubangi River than to the Nanticoke, even though the
freshwater gastropod fauna of the Ubangi is better documented [2]. Reinforcement of conventional ignorance is
not the main problem I have with the NatureServe organization [3], but it is
certainly in the top ten.

How big is your budget, Dr. Young, and how large is your
staff? The FWGNA project has now
surveyed all or part of ten states. This
we have done with no more than $5K in grant support total, over 15 years. Those 16,139 miles we drove in 2012-13 were
unreimbursed. We have paid $49/night out
of our own pockets to sleep on air mattresses in Alexandria. We bought our own Dinty Moore.

I will end this essay, however, on a note of hope. Despite the layers of pseudoscientific
hoo-hah in which NatureServe cloaks its Explorer website, it remains just a
website, run by a political advocacy group.
And (how many times must we warn our students?) the internet is a wild
and woolly marketplace of information, both the good and the bad, and the buyer
must beware. Each report returned by the
NatureServe Explorer comes with the following disclaimer: “All documents
provided by this server are provided “as is” without warranty as to the
currentness, completeness, or accuracy of any specific data.” In the final analysis, the Explorer database
is not peer-reviewed science, and it does not pretend to be.

Thank heaven no legitimate researcher would ever confuse
spurious data made available from the website of an advocacy group with
reliable science. Thank heaven.

Notes

[1] Yes, it does seem plausible to me that the initial
state-by-state freshwater gastropod distributions uploaded to the NatureServe
Explorer may have been the work of some intern hired to extrapolate the broad
ranges found in J. B. Burch’s North American Freshwater Snails. Burch lists 15 subspecies of P. gyrina, the
ranges of at least two of which certainly include Delaware. The range of Physella gyrina aurea is given as “New Jersey
to Kansas, south to Arkansas and Florida,” and that of Physella gyrina cylindrica is
given as “Ontario and New York south to Virginia.” Then did our young intern simply miss Delaware
when extrapolating “New England to Ohio, Tennessee and the Virginias” for P.
heterostropha? And did that intern miss
Delaware when extrapolating “Eastern United States, from Maine west to Iowa,
south to Texas and Florida” for Menetus (Micromenetus) dilatatus? And so forth?
The entire enterprise is a house of cards.

1 comment:

I believe we have discussed this issue before in person and online on your blog (see http://fwgna.blogspot.com/2011/12/toward-scientific-ranking-of.html). No need to go into details there again. Please review the discussion, however.

Anyway, whether what you say is true or not (and some of it is- see I can be reasonable) is irrelevant to the role Natural heritage ranking plays in mollusk conservation. The NatureServe database is not intended to be scientific with a testable hypothesis using the scientific method. The database is to be used as a source for information useful for biological species, population, and ecosystem conservation. It is an assemblage of data on current taxonomy, fence, distribution, occupancy, habitat, threats, trends, rarity, and conservation for select groups of organisms in North America. Much like your Freshwater Gastropods of North America (albeit without identification keys), it consolidates lots of information into an easily accessible, user friendly location freely available to the public at large.

Much like a field guide or natural history atlas, the information contained within is just that- information only. Arguably the NatureServe Explorer online database is the most valuable source of information on North American species conservation because it contains so much information on so many taxa. This includes information (even when incomplete as with ) on "common" or otherwise non-imperiled taxa. This is in contrast with other conservation status ranking methodologies like USESA and AFS.

This system is naturally inherent with untested errors. The same could be said of any published guide book, museum specimen lot (especially so), and dare I say it, your own FWGNA web site! The beauty of this system however is that the information is available publicly and can be easily corrected. In the case you mentioned about Delaware occurrences, you would not even be aware of the absence of such records in Delaware had you not been utilizing the NatureServe Explorer database in the first place (and I'm guessing this not the first time you've used it). The error can be rectified increasing the accuracy of the database through peer review (the defense here might I request that the court hereby consider Mr. Dillon a hostile peer reviewer?). Such review and accompanying corrections are actually encouraged to make the database a more accurate resource.

In short (I guess this was not so short), please reconsider your opinion of the NatureServe Explorer database as an information source rather than a scientific study... And please, continue to send in your corrections. They only make the database stronger.